11 comments:

Happy Thanksgiving, Tom (and Angelica), and thanks for this and for the fine efo and Catskill turkey photos. The latter shot reminds me so much of our own turkey families that made our lives and my mother's so beautiful in Tuxedo, NY, as they proceeded here, there and basically everywhere back then. Bringing it all back home and up to the present day (the two shots are great but President Reagan is so 25 years ago and President Kennedy so sadly 50 years ago), I was pleased to see the ever-vigilant Morrissey's statement about the current president, turkeys and Thanksgiving, which is found here:

When one sees the workers going not only beyond the call of duty but beyond the bounds of "civilized" behaviour in those turkey death factories, kicking and dragging and slamming birds which are defenseless and immobile, their beaks and toes having been rudely shorn -- it makes you wonder.

Your question is one actually worth losing sleep over and I just don't know. I see reflections in mirrors and images on tv screens (along with words) that I think should clue me in but I am still clueless. If this aspect of the agriculture business could legitimately and pejoratively be described as "conservative" (because it has persisted and been preserved for so long), it makes you wonder whether "progressive" values really exist or if progressives are simply "shelter" magazine subscribers who buy expensive in-home rotisseries, vote along predictable party lines because it's easier to do that than to try to discriminate among choices, and bandy about the word "humane" as if that signifies anything much. Happy Thanksgiving anyway. I must say that I enjoy the holiday much more now than I did when I was young and trapped among warring relatives and expected to be seen and not heard. Now when I'm silent, it's a choice. Curtis

Many thanks to those who have been giving this a bit of thought. (And by the by, as the dark months come on, we here and undoubtedly everyone everywhere can surely use all the fellow-feeling we can get -- so for those who will be celebrating this holiday, in whatever fashion, and to their families, from the bats here in the creaking belfry of the endarkened haunted house, many happy returns of the season.)

With the passing of time, it may be that for some people of conscience the assumption of human dominion is coming to be questioned, not simply on ethical and moral grounds (basic matters of principle) but on grounds of practicality; it's coming to be seen by many that humans have not only fouled their own nest, but ruined the planet for everything else living, bit by bit by bit. The greed-fest which is the national Holiday of Thanksgiving would be a salient example. It's hard not to see this as being about business. Turkeys can be manufactured in vast numbers and made ready for slaughter in a short time, and "produced" so cheaply that this industry continues to be profitable even though there are many who are now recognizing the illusory (or worse, self-delusionary) element in the warm, securing "traditional" or "familial" feeling which comes seeping back into one who identifies the sight or smell or even thought of a roast turkey with All the Good Things. Now more than ever when it seems there are nothing but Bad Things, there is a frantic desire to preserve that illusion of glowing familial warmth, at all cost and indeed notwithstanding the nostalgia-challenging fact that it now appears the legendary Pilgrims' Thanksgiving was very likely a vegetarian feast after all.

All of this seems a human affair, a matter of human cultural and psychological need for meaning and feeling in a time when the numbing touch of cold plastic has come to replace every other form of interactive currency. The poor turkey is only an unwilling accessory, the sacrificial victim that was still alive and afraid even as they they dropped it into the scalding pot.

great social commentary...you could say that the mass consumption of turkey,given the brutalization of the food prior to consumption is not Kosher...maybe the Rabbis and Imams will pick up on this...we have, however much to be thankfull for though around us Black Friday, Gray Thursday, andCyber Monday besmudge a Holiday forThanking God for gifts...like reading this blog and viewing theTom Clark paintings hung on my walls...though Tom C may not attribute his gifts to a higher power...they're not just a productof high IQ,dexterity and a clevermind